The Era Of City-Dwelling Millennials Is Coming To An End

If you look at this chart from a
recent blog post by Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko, there's
not a ton of movement between where people live now and where
they would like to live in the future. But what movement there is
shows that those who do want to move want to get to a more rural
place five years from now.

Trulia's survey showed that urbanites are more likely than people
living in more outlying areas to want to change their
surroundings. Kolko notes, "Two-thirds (67%) of urbanites
wanted to live in an urban area in five years, compared with 80%
of suburbanites and 83% of rural residents who wanted to live in
areas like where they were."

The idea that millennials are super into the city seems to be
more of a function of age than an innate generational quality.
Those at the high end of the millennial generation are now in
their 30s, and the plurality are in their mid-20s. As a
generation, they are well-educated. They entered the workforce
just before or just after the financial crisis. The cities are
where the jobs and the dating opportunities were, so it's no
surprise that they flocked to them.

In his post, Kolko quantified the tendency of younger
adults to be more city-focused. He pointed out that the
likelihood of living in urban neighborhoods rather than the
suburbs peaks in the mid-to-late 20s, and steadily drops off as
30-somethings start to form families and move out of the
city:

But a decade from now, the landscape will look very different.
Millennials will pair up and have kids and want space. Cities,
particularly the megacities like New York and Chicago, aren't
likely to become more affordable.

Demographics are destiny. That big bulge of younger millennials
visible in the population pyramid is going to be hitting the
prime age range for
marriage and having kids in
the next few years, and it's likely that many of those new
families will move out to the 'burbs (or further!).

The
Census Bureau projects that a huge number of younger
millennials will be aging into their late 20s and early 30s
during the next decade. Meanwhile, since there are fewer
teenagers today than younger 20-somethings, the number of
city-loving young adults is projected to drop:

All those city-dwelling millennials are about to hit the time in
their lives when they're going to be ready to start settling
down, and this could mean a big population shift from the city to
the suburbs.

That means we're currently at peak urban millennial. It's all
downhill from here, kids.